The night before Liverpool’s former owners faced the media for the first time at Anfield in February 2007, a meeting was held about the running order for business.

George Gillett, a junk bond millionaire, had initially been batted away from the club because he did not have deep enough pockets. To change his possibilities, he enlisted the help of Inner Circle Sports, an investment bank from New York City. Ultimately, the conversations sent him to Tom Hicks, someone he’d worked with before after they put money into a meat-packing company.

Hicks’ interest in Liverpool came relatively late, and because of this — according to one club official present at the time but who spoke to The Athletic on condition of anonymity to protect their current position — it was suggested that Gillett should field the earliest questions in the press conference. Hicks was having none of it. “I’ll go first,” he said. And he got his way.

It was an early indication that this marriage was never likely to last. Within a few months, the club was unofficially in the grip of a civil war, with the co-owners no longer on speaking terms.

Their reign staggered on for three agonising years before a High Court ruling led to another sale, this time to Fenway Sports Group (FSG), with the whole exercise just serving to underline how difficult it is to make co-ownership work in the high-stakes world of Premier League football.

All of which brings us to Chelsea, and the strife between co-owners Todd Boehly and Behdad Eghbali, of Clearlake Capital.

The London club’s fans may not appreciate the parallel, but they could do worse than look north if they wished to understand how and why things can go so wrong so quickly with joint owners. 

In the Gillett role, you have Boehly. Both are American businessmen with pre-existing sporting interests (Gillett owned ice hockey’s Montreal Canadiens, Boehly part-owns baseball’s LA Dodgers) who were wealthy enough to control one of England’s biggest sporting institutions, but not quite rich enough to do that and fulfil those clubs’ vast ambitions.

The parallels don’t end there. Gillett only completed his takeover after other bidders failed. With Liverpool urgently needing money to fund a new stadium project, he returned with Hicks.

At Chelsea, it was only possible for Boehly to claim the club as his own because of money from Clearlake and Eghbali. And here, too, time was of the essence: the UK government had set a deadline of May 31, 2022 for Chelsea to be sold amid ongoing sanctions against the previous owner, Roman Abramovich, a Russian oligarch.

Since the takeover’s completion, Boehly has taken many of the headlines but Eghbali has played a big part in a lot of internal processes and decision-making. It was the same at Liverpool, where Hicks — despite being introduced to the club by Gillett — always tended to come first when their names were mentioned in tandem.

If anything, Liverpool’s ownership partners fell out even quicker than Chelsea’s. In Brian Reade’s book about the period, An Epic Swindle, he quotes an unnamed senior football executive and a Liverpool fan who met both owners individually. 

“It was only two months into their joint ownership of the club but George was talking about his view versus his partner’s view. When I later had lunch with Tom and some of his American associates, I asked about the dynamics of their relationship. Tom shrugged and said, ‘You’d better ask him,’ pointing at a senior figure from Inner Circle Sports, who had brought the two together for the deal.”

From the beginning, there was a lack of understanding about who was really in charge at Liverpool. This stemmed from the fact each partner had an equal number of shares — a difference to Boehly and Clearlake, with the latter’s stake totalling 61.5 per cent and Boehly’s less than 13 per cent.

By December 2007, with further differences being exposed around whether to revamp Anfield or relocate from it — sound familiar, Chelsea fans? — Gillett had already started exploring an exit strategy, having realised he’d made a monumental mistake with his choice of partner.

The challenges of running a business in the meat industry were a little different to a football club the size of Liverpool: a responsibility that invites emotion, attention and criticism, with each factor testing a person’s ego. Those who dealt with Hicks — a brash Texan whose investment firm had initially made money in radio and soft drinks — suggest he had one as big as Mount Rushmore.

Personality clashes are often at the root of co-ownership implosions, although tensions are often strategic as much as personal.

Take Crystal Palace, probably the club whose current ownership issues most closely resemble Chelsea’s in the top flight. 

In 2010, Palace were brought out of administration by a group of wealthy local supporters led by Steve Parish. After an unexpected promotion to the Premier League in 2013 and a couple of seasons of struggle, the ownership model changed, with Parish seeking outside investment from America in the form of private equity tycoons Josh Harris and David Blitzer, who bought stakes in 2015, and John Textor, who purchased around 40 per cent of the club six years later. His stake has since crept up to 45 per cent.

John Textor wants full control of a Premier League club (Wagner Meier/Getty Images)

Despite their vastly differing-sized stakes, Parish, Textor, Harris and Blitzer all have an equal voting share, which is a problem given the strategic differences between them.

Parish, who runs Palace day to day, wants to follow a long-term sustainable economic model, based around infrastructure improvements, while Textor is keen to attack the transfer market and take advantage of the other elements of his Eagle Football multi-club model (he also owns Ligue 1 club Olympique Lyon, Brazil’s Botafogo and Belgian side RWD Molenbeek). Blitzer and Harris seem happy, by and large, to retain the status quo.

It would be stretching it to claim Palace are in the grip of a Chelsea-style civil war, but the strategic impasse effectively means the club is stuck — hence why Textor is now trying to sell his Palace stake and buy Everton, which Farhad Moshiri has been trying to sell for a couple of years.

Officially, Moshiri has been the sole owner of Everton since 2016 when he displaced the late Bill Kenwright, who stayed on as chairman. Although Kenwright’s power was gone, he remained influential and a high-profile presence around the club, a point which created its own issues. His views did not always align with Moshiri, notably around decisions such as sacking manager Roberto Martinez in 2016 and around some transfers, and the result was barely-controlled chaos.

There was, perhaps, something similar at play with Newcastle United and the recent departures of Amanda Staveley and Mehrdad Ghodoussi — the couple who helped secure the club’s Saudi Arabian-backed takeover in 2021.

Amanda Staveley and Mehrdad Ghodoussi watching Newcastle United in August 2023 (Stu Forster/Getty Images)

At that point, there was no sporting director or CEO at the club, so Staveley and Ghodoussi assumed responsibility for those areas until an executive team was eventually put in place, becoming the public faces of the club’s executive team. But their influence was belied by their 10 per cent ownership stake.

Ultimately, once those pre-existing vacancies had been filled, there was a sense of too many competing voices and, in that scenario, there was only ever going to be one winner.

Will the same thing happen at Manchester United? INEOS and the Glazer family have never worked together before. Sir Jim Ratcliffe has had much influence over the club since his investment but it will be interesting to see what sort of pressure he is subjected to internally if results on the pitch continue.

Co-ownership structures can be a success, but only — it would seem — when the partnerships are not flung together simply through circumstance. Wrexham’s duo of Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney seem to have found a way to work in harmony, although if their project ever reaches the Premier League, with all the attendant scrutiny and financial demands, that partnership could come under renewed scrutiny.

Who knows where Chelsea will be by then? Either way, the chances of Boehly and Egbhali still being in partnership seem minimal.

(Top photos: Getty Images)

Valentina Petrillo, a transgender Paralympian who competed against women at the Paralympic Games in Paris, fired back at criticism levied from J.K. Rowling for participating in the event.

Petrillo’s eligibility on the women’s side of the Paralympics in Paris caused backlash in the weeks leading up to the Games. Petrillo competed in the T12 400-meter sprint. The Italian runner was diagnosed with a degenerative eye condition known as Stargardt disease as a teenager and began transitioning from male to female in 2019.

The “Harry Potter” author wrote on X last week that Petrillo was cheating. Petrillo fired back in an interview with The Times of London.

“JK Rowling is only concerned about the fact that I use the female toilet, but she doesn’t know anything about me,” Petrillo told the outlet.

Petrillo blamed the criticism on a world allegedly rooted in “prejudice and transphobia.”

AUSTRALIAN B-GIRL SAYS SHE EXPECTED TO ‘GET BEATEN’ AT PARIS OLYMPICS IN FIRST INTERVIEW SINCE CONTROVERSY

Valentina Petrillo prepares to compete at the Stade de France Stadium, during the Paris Paralympics, Monday, Sept. 2, 2024. (AP Photo/Jackson Ranger)

While World Athletics banned trans athletes from competing in women’s events if they transitioned after puberty last year, World Para Athletics still allows transgender athletes to participate as long as they declare that their gender identity for sporting purposes is female and provide evidence that their testosterone levels have been below 10 nanomoles per liter of blood for at least 12 months prior to their first competition. 

“Since 2015, when the IOC opened the Olympics to transgender people, there has only been one person who competed, Laurel Hubbard,” Petrillo added. “And there has only been one [openly transgender] person that has participated at the Paralympics, me. So all of this fear that trans people will destroy the world [of women’s sport] actually does not exist.

“People said [lots of] men would go to compete as women just so they could win, but that has not happened at all. It is just transphobia.”

Rowling fired back at Petrillo after the interview was published.

J. K. Rowling arrives for the Guinness Six Nations match at the Scottish Gas Murrayfield Stadium, Edinburgh, on Feb. 24, 2024. (Andrew Milligan/PA Images via Getty Images)

“Yeah, no. That’s not the only thing I, or any of the other millions of women concerned about the destruction of female categories, boundaries and rights, are concerned about,” she wrote on X.

Fox News’ Paulina Dedaj contributed to this report.

Follow Fox News Digital’s sports coverage on X and subscribe to the Fox News Sports Huddle newsletter.

CLEVELAND — How long? How much longer do Browns fans have to wait to see the quarterback they were promised? 

We’re into Year 3 of the Deshaun Watson Experience and the first lap around the track didn’t feel any differently. Is it too late to speak to a manager and request a refund? 

It’s supposed to be different this year. He’s healthy now. The suspension is long behind him. The offense has been rebuilt to suit his strengths. The Browns have overhauled their entire operation to make him more comfortable. 

Success can still happen. It’s only one game and this offense had little time together in the preseason and training camp. That was evident during Sunday’s 33-17 embarrassment at the hands of the Dallas Cowboys.

Watson should’ve played at some point in the preseason. That’s an organizational failure. It was 300 days from his broken shoulder last season until Sunday’s opener. We’ve been through this before with Watson and long layoffs. We know how it ends by now. 

It may not have made a difference in Sunday’s outcome, but it’s impossible to watch the Browns’ first game and believe they were ready for the start of the season. They weren’t. Whether they’ll be ready for the start of the season by Week 2 is debatable at this point. 

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But the bulk of this mess belongs to the quarterback. His minus-0.36 EPA/play was tied for second-worst on Sunday. Yes, there were far too many drops by his receivers, but his expected completion percentage was still less than 64 percent. That was fourth-worst for Week 1 entering Sunday night’s game. 

If we’re being honest, this rebuilt offense had a “the orange is oranger” type of feel to it. Nothing really looked much different from what we’ve seen previously other than a deeper disdain to run the ball. There were only a handful of RPO calls and at least one of them was negated by penalty. Watson was still under center for a decent amount of time. 

Watson was hit 17 times and sacked six. The 17 hits were easily the most of any quarterback in Week 1. But the one narrative we can’t have this week, the one talking point I won’t stand for is that Watson was hit too much because his protection broke down and he didn’t have enough time to throw. It’s a lazy assumption based on the statistics and the most outrageous lie you’ll hear all week. It is categorically false. Even Browns coach Kevin Stefanski has been duped. 

“He got hit way too often,” Stefanski said. “We can’t let that happen to him. … We have to protect our quarterback better than that.” 

Or, and hear me out, the quarterback has to protect himself better than that.

Dallas’ defense blitzed on one-fourth of its snaps, which was fairly average compared to other Week 1 teams. Here are the important numbers to know, according to a deep dive on data provided by TruMedia and PFF. All of the league-wide rankings are through all Week 1 games before Monday night.

• Watson averaged 4.16 seconds to throw per pressured dropback Sunday, the eighth-best time under pressure. On sacks that resulted from pressure, he held the ball for 4.29 seconds, the sixth-best time in Week 1. 

• On the six sacks he did take, his average time to throw was 4.87 seconds — which ranked 10th. 

• Since he joined the Browns in 2022, Watson has been the slowest from snap to throw on pressured dropbacks of any quarterback across the league (4.60 seconds). Tom Brady, who coincidentally called the game for Fox, was the fastest at 3.26 seconds. 

Part of what has made Watson great throughout his career is his ability to hold the ball and extend plays. It’s disingenuous to then turn around and blame his line for protection breakdowns when they are giving him more time to throw against pressure than any other offensive line in the NFL the past two-plus seasons. 

This isn’t a protection issue. It’s a Watson issue. 

There were costly procedure and false start penalties Sunday on both of the Browns’ starting tackles. That has to get cleaned up. But there was at least one sack that occurred because Watson was standing where he wasn’t expected to be so the protection wasn’t angled that way. 

It’s rhythm and timing issues. It’s “feel” issues. It just doesn’t seem like he’s seeing the field well. Or he’s not processing what he’s seeing. 

There were receivers open down the field Sunday, Watson was just busy throwing the ball 7 yards out of bounds on sideline routes and fade routes into the end zone. 

Here’s the best throw Deshaun Watson made yesterday. Hit CeeDee in stride.

Baller.#Brownspic.twitter.com/ifwtAlyzio

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— Ed Greenberger (@EdGreenberger) September 9, 2024

It was awful. It was worse than awful. It was some of the worst quarterback play in the league during Week 1. 

Forty-five minutes after Sunday’s game ended, while most players had showered and long departed the locker room, Watson was still unshowered wearing stained football pants and chatting with backup quarterback Jameis Winston. 

It was an emotional few days for Watson, whose father died this week. He was estranged from his father for most of his life, according to a Houston Chronicle story in 2017. But navigating grief is never easy. 

“I’m not going to use that as an excuse for why we played bad, but it was a heavy heart these last couple of days,” Watson said. “But again, I don’t want to use that as an excuse.”

Stefanski and the Browns have done everything they can to make Watson more comfortable in this offense. As Year 3 begins, the organization is holding on tight, patiently waiting for its $230 million gamble to show a proper return on its bold investment.

How long? How much longer will they have to wait? 

GO DEEPER

NFL Week 1 takeaways: Cowboys’ talent overwhelms, Harbaugh’s formula works, Caleb Williams shaky

(Photo of Deshaun Watson getting hit by Micah Parsons: Nick Cammett / Getty Images)